Monday, May 20, 2013

In her aptly-named "Potomac Watch" column in The Wall Street Journal (via HBL),
Kimberly Strassel makes some astute observations about the targeting of conservatives for scrutiny by the IRS under Barack
Obama:

Mr. Obama now professes shock and outrage that bureaucrats at the
IRS did exactly what the president of the United States said was the right and
honorable thing to do. "He put a target on our backs, and he's now going to
blame the people who are shooting at us?" asks Idaho businessman and longtime
Republican donor Frank VanderSloot.

Later, noting that, "The president didn't need a telephone; he had a
megaphone," Strassel elaborates on how Obama targeted conservative groups:

The president derided "tea baggers." Vice President Joe Biden
compared them to "terrorists." In more than a dozen speeches Mr. Obama raised
the specter that these groups represented nefarious interests that were
perverting elections. "Nobody knows who's paying for these ads," he warned. "We
don't know where this money is coming from," he intoned.

In case the
IRS missed his point, he raised the threat of illegality: "All around this
country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for
Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic
candidates . . . And they don't have to say who exactly the Americans for
Prosperity are. You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled
corporation."